A potential overdose was just one of the risks faced by people cared for in their own homes by staff at a failing agency in Croydon.

Medacs Healthcare has now been put into special measures by the Care Quality Commission (CQC).

The service, based in Park Street, Croydon, provides personal care to people living in their own houses and flats in the community.

It provides a service to older adults, younger disabled adults, and children.

An inspection in October found the care people received was not safe – A CQC report then rated Medacs Healthcare inadequate last month.

The report said: “The care people received was not safe. Records relating to risks people faced were inconsistent and inaccurate.

“People’s medicines records were not kept up to date and we identified instances where medicines records showed a potential overdose.

“The majority of people’s care calls were not delivered at the time they were expected and people gave us examples of where this had impacted significantly upon them and the safety of the care that they received.”

Medacs, part of an international company has said the rating is down to a lack of staff.

Director of homecare for the company, Beverley Sims-Manley, said: “We are deeply disappointed with the outcome of this inspection and the failings that have been identified.

“The deterioration in the quality of our service has resulted from the award of several contracts in a short period of time during 2018.

“These award successes were characterised by an unprecedented shortfall in staff transferring from the outgoing providers.

“This put substantial pressure on both our new services and our existing services.”

She added that an action plan includes suspending referrals until the company has enought staff to take on more work.

“We are working closely with the CQC and with our Local Authority partners to ensure our service users receive the quality of service they deserve at the time they require it,” said Ms Sims-Manley.

“We have invested in new staff and in additional training and support as a priority measure.”

At the time of the inspection there was one registered manager at Croydon office, which covers contracts across London.

Now the company will employ a second manager who is set to start this month to take on some of the work load.

Ms Sims-Manley said: “As an organisation we are and will continue to undertake a series of ‘lessons learnt’ exercises to ensure our local London homecare business learns from this incident and ensures that it maintains the appropriate level of quality consistently in the future.

Even though all of our other homecare locations are rated as Good we are sharing our lessons learnt with the management team of the wider national homecare business to ensure that the necessary controls and processes are in place to prevent service levels ever deteriorating elsewhere.”